Introduction

I’ve had an NES (my wife’s actual childhood NES, in fact) sitting in my parts drawer, with the intent of ripping it apart, gutting it, and jamming in a Raspberry Pi to make an awesome emulation box since… well, ever since the Raspberry Pi came out. Then the Raspberry Pi 2 was released and I got one to use that instead. It can play PSOne games, after all. But other projects got in the way and I just hadn’t gotten around to it. But a few weeks ago, I was on Amazon.com for something else, and they suggested the Nexus Player which I already have and love. I’d been wanting to pick one up anyways to replace the combination of an old Roku and a Raspberry Pi running Raspbmc on our living room TV.

Luck had it that the Nexus Player was on sale and I suddenly had a thought… It runs Android. It could do much more than just retro games. And, surely there are supported game console emulators… A few minutes of searching confirmed that yes, there were some great ones for NES, SNES, Atari, and a few others. It supported the main three that my wife and I were interested in, so I ordered the Nexus Player and, later that night, started gutting the NES.

One of the major things we’ve been hard at work on lately is getting AllPixel kits a little closer to those who want them and either missed the Kickstarter or want more. So far, the AllPixel and PowerTap are available from these great distributors near (some of) you:

… sub-panel. Couldn’t resist the mild click-bait there As you can see in the video above; no, not a full-on jumbotron, but just a single 32×32 panel designed for digital billboards. I’ve had one sitting in my parts drawer for nearly a year… But yesterday, the awesome 1-Pixel PacMan post on HackADay gave me enough of a push to finally pull it out and get hacking.